IWP Sunday Afternoon Reading Series

Please join us for our annual IWP Sunday Afternoon Reading Series! This week’s event features IWP Residents Mona Sylviana (Indonesia), Lionel Ruffel (France), and Human Ip (Hong Kong, China). They will be joined by Iowa Nonfiction Writing Program candidate, Alayna Becker. Mona Sylviana is an Indonesian fiction writer and essayist. Her short story collection Wajah Terakhir (Gramedia Pustaka Utama, 2011) explores the lives of women in contemporary Indonesia. Her work has been translated into English, German, and French, and published in international anthologies including A Tale of Redemption & Other Stories (Lontar Foundation, 2015) and Footprints (Dalang Publishing, 2022). She is the author of Para Penjaga Tanah (dan) Air (Guardians of Land and Water, Noken Studio Nusantara, 2026), a collection of essays about indigenous communities in Central Sulawesi. She is currently working on a short story collection. Lionel Ruffel is a French literary scholar, publisher, and writer. He is the author of three essays on contemporary literature and culture: Le Dénouement (Verdier, 2005), Volodine post-exotique (Cécile Defaut, 2007) Brouhaha, les mondes du contemporain (Verdier, 2016, Minnesota Press, 2017), and three hybrid books that combine memoir, literary essay, and political fable: Trompe-la-mort (Verdier, 2019), I Can’t Sleep (Sternberg Press, 2021), and Trois éveils (Corti, 2024). His next book, Auto-évaluations, will be published in January 2027. Since 2005, he runs the chaoïd series (which focuses on new voices and emerging literature) at Verdier publishing house where he’s also an associate publisher. He is a professor of comparative literature and creative writing at Paris 8 University, where he co-founded the master’s program in creative writing in 2013 and has been co-director ever since. Lionel Ruffel has been a fellow in the Literary Arts Program at Banff Center for Arts and Creativity, a Humboldt Fellow at the Freie Universität (Berlin), Levehulme Visiting…